Retail establishments and product manufacturers are often interested in the shopping activities, behaviors, and/or habits of buyers. Buying activity data related to shopping can be used to correlate product sales with particular shopping behaviors and/or to improve timings or placements of product offerings, product promotions, and/or advertisements. Known techniques for monitoring buyer shopping activities include conducting surveys, counting patrons, collecting point of sale (POS) data, and/or conducting visual inspections of shoppers or patrons in the retail establishments, as well as business to business transactions.
Promotions for goods and/or services often result in additional or incremental unit sales of a product in the week the promotion is run. However, retailers and manufacturers may wish to know a normal or baseline pattern of sales without promotion effect. In that way, an effect of a promotion can be compared to a normal pattern of sales.
Evaluators and optimizers are two types of systems for studying promotional plans for products. Evaluators evaluate a promotional plan to reveal whether the implementation of that plan would cause the sales desired by the user. Optimizers use evaluators to develop new promotion plans or to suggest changes to existing promotion plans.
An existing system used to evaluate and/or optimize promotions for products is the Promotion Simulator from The Nielsen Company (US) LLC. The Promotion Simulator can be used to evaluate promotion plans implemented using regression models. The simulator takes one product and one promotion and evaluates the promotion. For example, for the product “X” brand shampoo and “Y” promotion, the simulator answers the question “would promotion ‘Y’ increase profits of ‘X’ brand shampoo by x %”.